Posted on 10/23/2012 6:57:26 AM PDT by Renfield
When it comes to the birth of America, most of us are working from a stew of elementary school history lessons, Westerns and vague Thanksgiving mythology. And while it's not surprising those sources might biff a couple details, what's shocking is how much less interesting the version we learned was. It turns out our teachers, Hollywood and whoever we got our Thanksgiving mythology from (Big Turkey?) all made America's origin story far more boring than it actually was for some very disturbing reasons. For instance ...
(Excerpt) Read more at frontiers-of-anthropology.blogspot.com ...
*ping*
Haven’t read the whole article yet, but reminded me of your lecture.
The author concludes, in error, that the Great Plague that depopulated the Americas started on the East Coast and then swept Westward.
Actually, due to recurring drought cycles in the Americas, the hanta virus, which thrives among its primary vector ~ fleas ~ which thrive on ground squirrels, which themselves thrive on pine nuts (and other nuts) ~ populations of hanta spreading fleas on ground squirrels boom and crash in time with the great droughts.
There's a drought cycle in North America that parallels the drought cycle in East Asia ~ and it is in tune with the solar cycles. Half a full sunspot cycle is about 11 years. A full sunspot cycle is about 21 to 22 years ~ sometimes longer, e.g. the 24 year cycle we just experienced ~ and four such cycles will occur over an 80 to 85 year period ~ and at least once in that 80 to 85 year period there will be a serious drought in the North, South, East or West in North America, and/or China.
Occasionally there will be a GREAT DROUGHT which will occur in the four quadrants simultaneously. Same in China. In fact, if you are in China you will know all you need to know about the North American dought cycle then occurring in roughly the same way.
These are overlaid with wet/dry cycles climate cycles, Pacific and Atlantic cycles, and to a degree with jet stream cycles that may or may not be directly related to any of this.
The Spanish arrived in the Americas at the end of a drought cycle ~ much of North America was burned over and in the East Coast people who lived above the Fall Line had fresh water. South America had also been experiencing drought.
Alas, the people in the South began to experience RAIN as the drought ended, and that brought back grass, and the nut bearing trees bloomed and bore nuts. The ground squirrels ate the nuts. The fleas thrived in an expanded population of ground squirrels. Hanta virus spread and the agricultural communities throughout South America in the Great Amazonian and Andean civilizations suffered a serious population crash.
Mexico was a bit different, but the droughts had been equally severe ~ giving the Aztecs an incredible advantage over their enemies since they literally lived in the midst of a very large fresh water lake at the foot of a gigantic volcano that was sufficiently high enough to pull moisture out of the winds blowing in from the Pacific.
In the end the plague came several times to Mexico and the people died.
The plague continued to move North and swept through what is now the US East Coast in the 1640s.
So, plague sweeps from South to North, not East to West ~ that's what the Spanish records show. But that's after the recovery after one of America's Great Droughts ~ when the rains return, the nut trees bloom, the ground squirrels prosper, the fleas swarm, and the hanta virus gets spread!
It delayed the settlement of North America by Europeans for about 160 years ~ which is just about two of those 80 to 85 year cycles ~ a clue!
We may still be in the midst of one of The Great Droughts right now ~ so pray for rain ~ pray for a good wheat crop ~ pray for the preservation of the corn.
The 100 million number usually comes up in discussions of the entirity of North America ~ not about just the East Coast!
bump for later
Its hard to buy the writer thesis when you consider that with 100 million minds in that sophisticated new world society not one had thought of inventing the wheel.
I hate headlines that pretend to tell me what I think or believe.
The aliens built all that! ;-)
viz- near Ft. Plain NY In this town are found the remains of one of those ancient fortifications which are so common in Central and Western New York, and throughout the Western States, indicating that it was inhabited long prior to the advent of the Indians.
These mounds are the most easterly of any of the kind yet discovered. They are about four miles south of Fort Plain, on a tongue of land formed by the valleys of Otsquaga Creek and one of its tributaries. This tongue is one hundred feet above the streams, and the declivities are very steep.
Across the tongue, at its narrowest part, is a curved line of breastworks, 240 feet in length, inclosing an area of about seven acres. A gigantic pine, six feet in diameter, stood upon one end of the embankment, showing that the work must have been of great antiquity
montgomery.nygenweb.net
between Ames road and the golf course
--
Fort Plain Museum 389 Canal Street Fort Plain, NY 13339 (518)993-2527 - main Email: fortplainmuseum@yahoo.com
http://www.crookedlakereview.com/articles/101_135/103spring1997/103robinson.html
Spring 1997 Home Index Museums Blog Authors Site Map About
Who Built the "Old Fort" on Bare Hill and other Pre-Seneca Structures in Yates County, N. Y.? by
"T. Apoleon Cheney notes (in Illustrations of the Ancient Monuments of Western New York) that a twelve-foot high elliptical mound above Cattaraugus County's Conewango Valley held eight big skeletons. Most crumbled, but a thigh bone was found to be 28" long. Exquisite stone points, enamelwork, and jewelry (like that of Mexico or Peru) were also unearthed in the area. The mound looked like those of the Old World. "
http://skeptoid.com/episode.php?id=4144#bottom
----------------
Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York E.G. Squier. 1849, 193 pp., $18.95p
With the help of 72 figures and 14 large plates, Squier details the abundant aboriginal works found in New York and elsewhere. Included are chapters on mounds and other earthworks as well as implements and ornaments. The long appendix leaves New York and delves into the fortifications of the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians, the aboriginal use of copper,and some ancient works found in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.
=========================== There are about 1500 ancient sites in Western New York, most of these the Archeologists know of, however there are many that they are not aware of. Some of these the Archeologists have labeled Iroquios, but others they classify Hopewell and yet some others with state sponsored markers say, pre Iroquois occupation.
================
The Iroquois said to the Dutch in 1600`s in Western New York State that the mounds upon which their ``castles` were built were already there with remains of ancient stockades & other structures when their ancestors came. {O`Callahan, `Hist of New Netherlands`].<[> The English and Americans built their western forts upon these sites [Fort Plain, e.g.] An 1848 NY State archeology study documented over 300 mounds along the Mohawk River and Finger Lakes stretching to the St. Lawrence River.
When the French came to build a fort in northern New York in 1700`s they asked their Abenaki and Iroquois allies where a good source of hard stone was so they could quarry it out for building the stone fort. The Indians said, ``Follow us." They showed the French engineers 2 different sites only 1/4 of a mile apart that had been blasted out with hundreds of stone blocks some 6 long and wide and one was piled up like a small mountain of huge toy blocks. They told the French it had been their before their ancestors came. The British showed this huge `pile of stones` on a 1758-9 map. I saw one of the `stone mountains` and clambered all over it when I was a kid in 1940` s and the huge stone blocks were still there but they were removed to build dams etc in the 1960`s. The other one`s blocks evidently were removed to build the fort.
The early explorers into New Hampshire and Vermont from Mass. discovered a huge mountain of stone blocks [pyramid?]in early 1700`s. But this site probably was used also for house and barn foundations, has since disappeared. [Cf. Masachusetts History]
In California from Orinda to San Jose, a long stone wall that stands 12 feet tall is buried in the ground along the tops of the Oakland and Hayward hills along Barn Rock Road and other parts. It`s over 30 miles long.
A nun did a study of these features and it was published in the Oakland Tribune in the 1980`s with pictures.
The Ohlone Indians there say that this ``wall` was there when their ancestors came thousands of years ago. I saw the humongous blocks of stone over in the 1980`s-90`s on Barn Rock Road in the Hayward hills.. Many were used in the barns and houses there for foundations. Figure that one out.
Or any other technology for that matter. He compares a big pile of colored dirt to the Great Pyramid and a “metropolis” of straw huts to London. And some Indian sailed to Holland in Biblical times and “discovered” Europe.
What a crock ...
Or any other technology for that matter. He compares a big pile of colored dirt to the Great Pyramid and a “metropolis” of straw huts to London. And some Indian sailed to Holland in Biblical times and “discovered” Europe.
What a crock ...
I'd love to find out more about this. Can you point me to any other sources?
“The profanity is annoying.”
Agree. I stopped reading it.
No, it wasn’t. Not even close. Th Eqyptians had the wheel, domesticated animals, a written language, metal tools, significant engineering skills, some math, etc.
North American Indians had none of that. How easily people fall for te equivalent of Afro-centric history when it is fed to them by the “History Channel” and left winger academics and popular writers.
You say you don’t have an issue with 20 million, and then you to cast a skeptical eye on the numbers. There is no evidence anywhere in the world that would corroborate that stone age cultures like those north of the Rio Grande could support anything like the population density required for 20 million. The level of technological advancement and culture of N. American Indians was similar to that of Australian aborigines and the San of S. Africa.
The people promoting preposterous numbers are trying to get cultural and political leverage by inflating numbers just as “Afrocentric Scholars” have in connection with the slave trade to be able to play the “Holocaust card”.
The issue isn’t the “Americas”, it is North America, north of the Rio Grande. There was no popular belief in “compelling evidence” until gramscian/postmoderns decided a new “narrative” was needed. The “sources” are junk books like 1491.
Cultures without the wheel, metal working, domesticated draft animals, writing, etc. at no time in history or in any place have supported “large, very complex societies” - not in Australia, not in Africa, and not in N. America.
100 million people scattered all over North America isn’t actually much, it’s a big 3 countries with a LOT of fertile land and tons of animals.
Assuming that you already had something of the frontiersman in you -- that you were good at hunting, gathering, fishing, herding, farming.
The religious sectarians who settled Plymouth Colony and would-be gentlemen who landed at Jamestown had real problems at first because they didn't have the skills or ability to make a go of it.
Later colonists had better skills and lower expectations, knew what to expect, and adapted more easily to the new environment.
Egypt had stone weapons and were violently brought into the bronze age by the Hyksos invasion.
viz-
“7.52n. 122w37n.
“Around Berkeley there are mysterious and ancient walls of stone with no apparent purpose. They are rather ordinary looking and survive in sections from 20 feet to 200 yards long. They vary from 2 feet to 5 feet tall and are 4 feet wide at ground level. This indicates that the walls were originally much higher. The rock goes down ten inches below the surface. Some of the rocks weigh more than 200 pounds. The walls extend nearly seven miles into the Oakland Hills. They do not appear to be animal corrals or pens either. They are mainly straight. Some intersect at angles and there are distances of parallel walls separated by ten yards or so but no indications that they form enclosures.
Many of the rocks weigh hundreds of pounds and some of the stones in the walls weigh up to one ton. They are chiefly located around Vollmer and Grizzly Peaks, a gully on the South slope of Mount Baldy and overlooking Redwood Canyon on the South side of Round Top.
The structures consist of loose piles of rocks strung along in straight, curved and sometimes even parallel lines. Weathering and lichen covering as well as the fact that they are now embedded in a soil rise of one foot on average indicates extremely great age.
https://sites.google.com/site/georgemitrovicauthor/mysterious-archeological-sites
California’s East Bay Walls < Prev Next >
Posted By: lehara2003 lehara2003 Offline Send Email
Wed Aug 18, 2004 6:29 am |
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Enigma Unsolved:
California’s East Bay Walls
By Andy Asp
In the barren, dusty hills to the east of the San Francisco Bay, there exist a number of crude stone walls running across grassy peaks and down through dry streambeds. Up to a meter high and a meter wide, the walls run in broken sections ranging from ten meters to over a half mile long. Some look to be careless piles of melon-sized rocks, while others are carefully constructed dry-laid (unmortared) masonry, occasionally using large sandstone boulders weighing a ton or more. The walls appear to be very old, perhaps even ancient. Many of the formations have sunk far into the earth, and others have accumulated thick calico coats of lichen. They are often completely obscured by dense thickets of poison oak and other brush.
Scholars and amateur archaeologists have been puzzled by the walls’ origins for over a century, due in large part to their apparent lack of purpose. The modest height would seem to rule out their function as fortifications, and the rambling start-and-stop patterns render them useless as corrals or containment fences. Examples can be found as far north as Berkeley and as far south as Milpitas, near the Silicon Valley. One researcher estimates that if the walls were strung together, they would probably stretch for 20 miles or more.
So who built these ancient walls, and for what purpose? Science and history give us only a handful of clues, leaving room for a colorful range of theories. The appearance of a few rock circles in or near the walls— which some speculate to be “solstice sites”— helps to propel the imagination. In a 1904 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, a journalist asked:
“Do the miles of mysterious stone barriers, which serve no modern purpose, bespeak a lost civilization of Toltecs or Atlanteans?”
Let’s begin with the known facts. The land on which the walls lay was settled at various times by Native Americans, Spain, Mexico, and finally the United States. (Russian traders and Basque shepherds may have also passed through over the years.) In 1797, the Franciscan Order began the establishment of Mission San Jose in nearby Fremont, using conscripted Indian labor. One quite plausible theory states that the walls were built by Indian slaves, possibly to instill some brutal Christian work ethic into their heathen souls. However, the copious mission records make no mention of this.
The area’s earliest residents, the Ohlone Indians, are usually ruled out as the engineers behind the unusual walls’ construction. The tribes of this region were largely hunter-gatherers, and there is no ethnographic evidence to suggest the Ohlone built any lasting structures. While it’s possible the tribe may have built the walls as game blinds or perhaps for some spiritual purpose, author Malcolm Margolin (The Ohlone Way, 1978) stated:
“It was not typical of the Ohlone to go off and move heavy stones around. It sure beats the heck out of me what those walls are doing up there.”
This lack of a credible explanation for the walls’ existence has inspired generations of “wall-nuts” to pack a lunch and trek off into the scrub brush and oak-dotted hills in search of clues. Early in the last century, local newspapers featured a number of articles on the stone walls’ origins, some quite fanciful. A 1916 Oakland Tribune story (”Was Oakland Ancient Battleground?”) contained an illustration depicting sinewy bald Neanderthals angrily hurling rocks at one another. In 1904, Dr. John Fryer, professor of Oriental languages at U.C. Berkeley, declared:
“This is undoubtedly the work of Mongolians... the Chinese would naturally wall themselves in, as
they do in all of their towns in China.”
The popular and long-held notion that the walls were built by wandering visitors from Asia is not entirely without historical basis. In 1761, the noted French sinologist Deguignes returned to the West with accounts of a fifth century voyage by a group of Chinese Buddhist monks who claimed to have visited a distant land which they called Fusang. Some historians have interpreted descriptions of the voyage to support the idea that Fusang may have been California, though most agree it was more likely present-day Mexico. More recently, linguists have discovered similarities in the languages of California Indians and Siberian tribes. [See FT 133:12]
There is a less far-fetched possibility that the walls were built using the cheap and abundant Chinese labor left in California at the end of the Gold Rush. Thousands of Chinese workers had been imported to work in the gold fields, and later to complete the Transcontinental Railroad. Some long-time residents maintain that Asian workers built the walls, although no direct evidence supports this view.
A shortage of formal scholarship on the East Bay Walls has added to their mysterious appeal. But a turn-of-the-century ethnologist, Dr. Henry C. Meyers, Ph.D., believed that the walls were:
“...Undoubtedly erected centuries ago... Neither man nor men of the present day could possibly put the large stones of these walls in place without appliances of some kind.”
And Dr. Robert F. Fisher, the former president of the Mission Peak Heritage Foundation, stated:
“These walls are just enigmas. They predate the Indians. They predate the Spaniards. It doesn’t fit in with any of the later history.”
One early wall researcher was Sister Mary Paula von Tessen of the Dominican Order at Mission San Jose. She devoted twenty-five years to studying the walls, making a number of maps and drawings in the early 1900s. But when Dr. Fisher (who served as personal physician to the Order until his retirement in the 1980s) tried to obtain Sister Paula’s notes, his efforts were met with a stony wall of silence. The Order’s archives still contain her writings on religious matters, but most of her work on the walls has apparently vanished into thin air.
Some wall enthusiasts would undoubtedly be disheartened were science to provide irrefutable evidence of a mundane or “earthly” reason for the walls’ original construction. Local legend states that the walls were built by wayward Celtic Druids, and there have been solstice vigils held in their presence. Dowsers have claimed to detect powerful and shifting “energy fields” surrounding the walls. (Upon trekking out to inspect the walls, this author was menaced by a pair of large rattlesnakes at the wall’s base, dancing erect like cobras and rattling their tails. Though it was surely some harmless courtship ritual by the timid creatures, it was nonetheless a bit disconcerting.)
One of the most clear and sober bits of evidence comes from the papers of Weller Curtner, descendant of Henry Curtner, a rancher who owned 2000 acres near Mission San Jose and leased land to tenant farmers in the 1870’s. The younger Curtner wrote:
“At the corner of Weller and Calaveras Road there was an Amish family by the name of Matthews... Those were the people that built the stone walls that you find along the top of the ridges. In the fall when the crops were off they would go out with stone boats made out of a couple willow trees.... They cleared the land and built the fence at the same time... same as they did in New England.”
While portions of the wall appear just moments from the campus of U.C. Berkeley, there has been little research done in the modern era using contemporary techniques. Russell Swanson, an amateur wall researcher, has tried in the past to arrange for tree core samples (from trees that grew up through the walls many years ago), Carbon-14 dating tests, and lichen dating tests, but was largely met with ambivalence by the scientific community.
Whether built by Toltecs, Druids, Atlanteans, Indians or farm workers, one thing is clear: certain portions of the walls are in danger. Due to increasing urban sprawl, the sections found on private land are being threatened by the bulldozer’s blade (a large stone circle on Pleasanton Ridge was obliterated by real estate developers in the 1990s). Ranchers have carved holes for roads and hauled off stones for more utilitarian purposes. Unless legislation is enacted to preserve the walls as part of California’s rich cultural heritage, their future is uncertain.
For the present, the bulk of the walls remain safely undisturbed on land held by the East Bay Regional Park District, for “wall-nuts” through the ages to follow and explore, pondering the unanswered questions: “Who? Why?” And the fact that these questions may remain unanswered suits most of them just fine.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Burress, Charles, “Unraveling the Old Mystery of East Bay Walls,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1984
Buxton, Terryn, & Norris, Courtney, “Rock Walls of Mission Peak Regional Preserve: An Overview,” for the East Bay Regional Park District in cooperation with Americorps/East Bay Conservation Corps, 1995
Collier, Michael, “More Mysterious Stone Walls Sighted in Hills Near Hayward,” Hayward Review, 1985
French, Harold, “Was Oakland Ancient Battleground? Prehistoric Walls Puzzle to Science,” Oakland Tribune, 1916
French, Harold, “Who Built the Pre-historic Walls Topping Berkeley Hills?” San Francisco Chronicle, 1904
Lane, Del, “Stone Walls an Ancient Mystery: Massive relics of unknown era,” Oakland Tribune, 1982
“Stone Age Relics Discovered in the Berkeley Hills,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1904
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Atlantis_Mysteries/message/1414
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The Berkeley Walls Extended
For almost two decades, R. Swanson has been searching out the enigmatic stone walls that festoon the Berkeley Hills and beyond, far, it now seems. We first mentioned these walls and provided a photograph back in 1985. (SF#39) Since then, Swanson’s labors have received a modicum of public notoriety but hardly a flicker of academic interest. One reason for professional disinterest seems to be that grant money for exploring old walls is nonexistent!
To bring new readers of SF up to speed on these perplexing California walls, we quote two paragraphs from a recent article by Swanson.
“On the crest of the Berkeley hills there is a long line of large rocks, some are three feet in length, they may weigh a half ton. A century ago they ran for miles on these dry, wind-swept crests then down in a line to what is now the botanical gardens.”
.....
“In the past twelve years, I have visited over forty miles of these stone structures. To call them walls is something of a misnomer. Some do go in a straight line, others twist like a demented snake up a steep hillside, others come in a spiral two hundred feet wide and circle into a boulder with a six-inch knob carved on the top of it. Some are massive, over six feet tall and run for miles.”
In the same article, Swanson relates how a local TV station that wanted to film the walls took him for a helicopter ride. As expected, all along the East Bay hills they discerned line after long line of walls. Then, when the copter passed over Mission Peak toward Mt. Allison, mile upon mile of still walls appeared. Numbed by these new discoveries, Swanson remarked:
“I could see years of work just laying there waiting for me.”
(Swanson, Russell; “The Berkeley Walls and Other Enigmas,” Bay Area Rock Art News, 15:7,
June 1997.)
http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf115/sf115p01.htm
Fascinating, thanks!
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